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Splines, Part II

About 14 months ago I found out I had the dreaded "bad clutch spline" issue with my R1100S. I pulled the transmission and sent it off to be fixed. 10K miles later I checked through the starter hole and discovered it was happening again. I monitored it for another 10K miles and while I collected the parts to give it another try.

This time I went with a new (to me) transmission. It has 66K miles on it, and no spline wear. Here's my thought process. There is a misalignment between the engine and the transmission. There are people who claim to be able to fix your transmission so it won't happen again (although apparently not all of them can do it every time). That means the problem is with the transmission. A new one is a crapshoot, but a known-good used one should be a winner. What do you think?

As a note, I had about a quarter inch of play between the clutch and the splines. Looking at my splines, about half the material is gone from the transmission side. I'm sure I could have gone quite a bit further, but I had the time to make the swap and a buddy to help me out. I've heard of people having as much as 10 mm. I'd be getting pretty concerned at that point.

As another note, I'm completely unimpressed with the QC process at BMW. We're not talking about a slight misalignment here. It is multi, multi, multi thousands of inches. That's just pathetic. It's really turned me off on the brand.

Jim- go do a search on correcting trans misalignment at Pelicanparts.com. A few have done extensive writeups on the procedure.
misalignment issues typically start showing up around 25-40K, and then reoccur every 20K after that, if left uncorrected.